The world was taken aback when the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2019. Ever since precautions have been taken to prevent the spreading or mutating of the virus, but the virus still keeps spreading and mutating. Scientists predict that the virus is going to stay for a long time but with reduced effectiveness. Recognizing the symptoms of the virus is essential in order to provide proper treatment for the virus. Visiting hospitals for consultation becomes quite difficult when people are supposed to maintain social distancing. Recently neural network generative models have shown impressive abilities in developing chatbots. However, using these neural network generative models that lack the required Covid specific knowledge to develop a Covid consulting system makes them difficult to be scaled. In order to bridge the gap between patients and a limited number of doctors we have proposed a Covid consulting agent by integrating the medical knowledge of Covid-19 with the neural network generative models. This system will automatically scan patient's dialogues seeking for a consultation to recognize the symptoms for Covid-19. The transformer and pretrained systems of BERT-GPT and GPT were fine-tuned CovidDialog-English dataset to generate responses for Covid-19 which were doctor-like and clinically meaningful to further solve the problem of the surging demand for medical consultations compared to the limited number of medical professionals. The results are evaluated and compared using multiple evaluation metrics which are NIST-n, perplexity, BLEU-n, METEOR, Entropy-n and Dist-n. In this paper, we also hope to prove that the results obtained from the automated dialogue systems were significantly similar to human evaluation. Furthermore, the evaluation shows that state-of-the-art BERT-GPT performs better.
Keywords: NLP; covid-19; dialogue system; sequence-to-sequence; transformer.
© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V.